Kigali is the battleground for Nigerian fintechs and others

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Eleven startups from six African countries will pitch to investors at the Africa Startup Summit in Kigali. The startups are: Bag Innovation (Rwanda), OkwuEco (Nigeria), M-Lugha App (Kenya), HouseAfrica (Nigeria), MarketForce (Kenya), The Awareness Company (South Africa), Limestart (Nigeria), M-omulimisa (Uganda), Talents Arena (Egypt), ThankUCash (Nigeria), and Riby (Nigeria).The Africa Tech Summit will hold from the 5th to the 6th of February, 2020. It will feature more than 600 stakeholders from the tech ecosystem. Disrupt Africa is powering the summit. Tom Jackson, the tech publication’s co-founder, says the summit’s focus is to provide startups opportunity to be on “stage in front of an expert jury panel and hundreds of potential investors, corporate partners, and customers.”Five out of the eleven startups are Nigerian. Two – ThankUCash and Riby – catch our eye because of the early-stage venture capital firm that more or less discovered and initially backed them for success. Read more about Microtraction’s strategy for identifying ‘remarkable’ founders.

— Your obligatory Jumia update… The e-commerce giant has hired Diana Owusu-Kyereko as the CEO for Jumia Ghana, replacing Ore Odusanya who had been the country manager since 2016. Owusu-Kyereko was the chief commercial officer (CCO) for Jumia Kenya, Techpoint reports. She holds degrees from  the London School of Economics and Political Science, and from the University of Leeds.Why you should care: Jumia Group, despite all of its troubles (and there were many) in 2019, is refusing cower. The size of the famed brand was cut down to 12 last year. But they’ve begun 2020 on an upbeat note; first launching an advertising arm, and now making this optimistic move in Ghana. Sceptics will say they are papering over glaring cracks but Jumia’s state of health is not bad on every score. They want, above all else, to prove that they are capable of rebounding from the annus horribilis that was H2 2019.

— Looking for tech entrepreneurship prizes and competitions to enter for? From the Ocean Innovation Challenge to the Margaret 2020 Awards, the first quarter of 2020 holds some interesting challenges that could be worth your time. Time to fine-tune that deck and revisit those total addressable market estimates!

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